Samsung updates their Android browser to introduce ad blocking

Whenever Apple introduces a new feature on its smartphone, it's only a matter of time before that feature finds its way to Samsung's mobile products. Case in point: an over the air update has introduced ad blocking to Samsung's Android web browser, after Apple debuted a similar feature on iOS last year.

Samsung's ad blocking system for their browser works in a similar way to Apple's in that it allows developers to create ad blocking extensions, rather than offering ad blocking as a native feature within the browser. It also only works with Samsung Internet, the company's in-house and default browser for their Android devices, not Chrome or third-party alternatives.

Unsurprisingly, the first ad blocking extensions for Samsung Internet have appeared alongside the update that allows ad blocking. AdBlock Fast, available through the Google Play Store, is a popular extension already found on iOS and on desktop versions of Chrome and Opera. It's free to install and open source, and its developer claims it can speed up the web browsing experience by 51 percent on average.

To use ad blocking on your Samsung device, at the moment you'll need to be running Android 6.0 with Samsung Internet 4.0 installed. In the future, Samsung will release an update that will bring the same functionality to devices running Android 4.2 and higher.